Reviewed by Spencer Ruchti
Jon Fosse has written repeatedly on suicide, melancholy, excruciating loss, the role or absence of God, and the border between this life and whatever follows. To read his enormous body of work in panorama is to see the frequent exchanges between the living and the dead, but also beautiful white visions as the curtain draws shut. “The whole of Septology is possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death. When a person dies it is said that one sees life repeated. Septology can maybe read as such a moment,” Fosse has said in an interview…
Reviewed by Joseph Schrieber
A mood, an atmosphere, rises up from the opening pages of Esther Kinsky’s River—a melancholy that unfolds so softly, so insistently that I repeatedly had to remind myself that I was reading words that originally existed in German. I found myself wondering: What would the German feel like in my hands? How would its texture taste, guttural tones against the back of my throat? These are questions that, in their asking, underscore how River is a text to linger in, to touch, to absorb, and recognize one’s self in…
Reviewed by Jonathan Wlodarski
“Whenever I set off on any sort of journey I fall off the radar. I think there are a lot of people like me. Who aren’t around, who’ve disappeared. They show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passport, or when the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key.” The woman speaking, perpetually traveling, is one of many voices animating the one hundred sixteen parts of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. These pieces build to something off the radar, a far cry from novels or short story collections in the conventional sense. If anything, they’re like people in transit, abstractions shot through with alarmingly distinctive features, demanding to be recognized in order to exist: the woman walking through the airport in rainboots, the child clutching a stuffed iguana on the bus. Like these people, the accumulation of fragments in Flights invites new perspectives and startling revelations…
Reviewed by Jan Steyn
The table of contents announces seven chapters (the numbers are mine): 1) Dragonese, 2) D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ Do Translations, 3) And Still No Rain / Roland Barthes Rhymes with, 4) Amateur Translator, 5) Maker of Wholes (Let’s Say of a Table), 6) Who Refuses To Let Go of Her Translations Until She Feels She Has Written the Books Herself (Or, Translation and the Principle of Tact).
I am interested in tables, so I turn to the fifth chapter and start skimming. It begins with the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand in Paris (the one with the four right-angled towers facing in on each other like open books and the “sunken forest garden” in its center). It ends with a plea to recognize the singularity of every translation. Ah, I think, she is here also “actively parrying against the all purpose explanation.”
And so: Kate Brigg’s book, This Little Art, is about translation, dragons, and tables. It argues for singularity and against all-purpose explanations. It applies the methods of genre-bending song and active parrying to evidence from Roland Barthes and the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand…
